DESCRIPTION:
Taken from the album 'Cabinet of Curiosities', 'Where There’s A Will'.
Remastered from original tapes & released on the archival collection 'Cabinet of Curiosities' in October 2014 by Freaks R Us

The Pop Group Official Shop: http://bit.ly/1HGyWbj

iTunes: Cabinet of Curiosities http://smarturl.it/CoC-iTunes

Rough Trade shops
Cabinet of Curiosities CD and LP http://smarturl.it/CoC-RoughTrade
Curiosities boxset http://smarturl.it/Curiosities-RghTrd

Amazon
Cabinet of Curiosities LP http://smarturl.it/ThePopGroup-Freak2
Cabinet of Curiosities CD http://smarturl.it/ThePopGroup-Freak
Curiosities boxset http://smarturl.it/TPG-CuriositiesBox

Video by Rupert Goldsworthy

Originally released as 7” single in 1980 and unavailable for several decades, 'Where There’s A Will' has been remastered from original tape for reissue as the opening track of The Pop Group’s compilation of rarities 'Cabinet of Curiosities'.

An incendiary dance, it revels as much as it rebels. The song unleashes a feral form of torn, breakneck agit-funk with its potent urgency and savagely scathing vitality undimmed since its original release. A breathless torrent of writhing deviant disco bassline and volcanic free jazz sax, the song is electrified by Mark Stewart’s vocals, a rasping blitz of politically-charged calls for defiance and solidarity. The significance of the message contained within the unruly party atmosphere is as essential now as it was back then, as Mark Stewart explains, “MASSIVE RESISTANCE is what Where There’s A Will is about and in this age of hyper anxiety and scorched earth it’s as relevant as ever to quote myself, the lyrics at the end say ‘and if we must die let it be like hogs…our backs against the wall… but fighting back’.”

The countercultural militant message is delivered as a hysterical, riotous spree, as Gareth Sager (guitar, sax) explains, “The group’s best attempt to mix a message with a groove plus some real free playing. If you’re really unhinged you may be able to dance to this.”

The 'Where There’s A Will' video, which reworks rare footage of the band performing the song on Belgian TV in 1980, has been realised by The Pop Group’s visual collaborator, NY based artist Rupert Goldsworthy, who says of the song, “In my opinion Dan Catsis plays the most crucial hard-funk bassline of the post punk era and it’s the masterpiece of The Pop Group’s repertoire. The track slices and re-dices the politico punk-funk genre two years before the herd. With mysterious lyrics, half poetic / half hectoring communiques from the front lines, it stands as The Pop Group’s raw, dirty, rambunctious, ecstatic epitaph.”

Goldsworthy goes on to explain that “the video riffs off The Pop Group’s oft-stated intent to do everything ‘differently’. Here everything is backwards. The video reflects the song’s original mutant marriage of Seventies hardcore old skool funk with brutalist agitprop rhetoric. It’s Good Times vs Apocalypse Now.”

Mark Stewart says of the video, “we are the children of the lens cannibal kids and Rupert Goldsworthy’s mashup madness truly reverses reality / the lunatics are taking over the asylum!!!!”

The Pop Group formed in Bristol in 1977 out of a sense of disenchantment with the increasing conservatism of punk.
Drawing on an eclectic range of influences from free jazz, conscious funk, heavyweight dub to avant-garde experimentalism, alongside contemporaries like Public Image Limited, This Heat and Throbbing Gristle, they were at the forefront of a musical period marked out by its ground-breaking innovation.

Their original missives, which Mark Stewart describes as “an index of possibilities”, still explode with an incandescent spirit and energy, possibilities expanded upon by recent live tours in Japan, America, Australia and the UK and the band's first studio album in 35 years, 'Citizen Zombie'.

http://www.thepopgroup.net/